Keeping track of cost and labor overruns can be hard!

When running a large maintenance management program where several hundred work orders or more are generated monthly it can be hard for managers to keep an eye on material and labor overruns. Not being able to track such items will result in unexpected expenses that will break your budget. Besides this keeping an eye out for such overruns can alert you to possible issues e.g. you estimate an equipment maintenance task should be done in 60 minutes but the work order actually took 90 minutes to do because the technician was not properly trained and made mistakes.

How maintenance software can track these overruns

Maintenance management/ CMMS software can help track actual costs and labor hours spent on a work order vs. estimated values. Most products allow you to create a “library” of standard maintenance tasks that detail how each job should be done. These tasks can be used as templates to create work orders. The costs and labor hours entered on the a maintenance task template are considered estimates of how long the work order would take to complete. These values are copied onto work orders created from the task as the default values. If the cost & the time taken to complete the work order differ, they can be updated on the work order. In the work order reports it is possible to compare the estimated duration of a work order to the actual duration to identify possible issues.

For example below we have a sample Category History Report showing work orders with their estimated duration as well as actual duration. On 9/5/2011 we see a work order that was estimated to be completed in 60 minutes but was done in 20 minutes. While this is not an overrun it is still a good idea to open up the work order to check why the original estimate was so large. Over estimation of costs and labor can also cause you to pre-allocate most of your budget and leave you with too little for other priority and lower urgency items (e.g. training, hiring additional personnel, tool replacement and more).

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